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Building the Morton digital library (with a little help)

One of the best aspects of working in an academic library/archive is the proximity of and access to students. For one, you can hire them to help with some of the more tedious and repetitive aspects of archival processing! But more importantly, they get on-campus access to valuable hands-on learning opportunities—and you get the benefit of their technological skills and expertise, not to mention the energy and fresh perspective they bring to projects.

Luckily, UNC-Chapel Hill boasts one of the top graduate schools of Information and Library Science in the country (currently tied for #1 in the U.S. News and World Report!). This is especially good news for us at “A View to Hugh,” because we’ll be working this semester with UNC SILS professor Jeffrey Pomerantz and the members of his Digital Libraries class (a few of which are pictured above) to begin developing an online presence for the Hugh Morton collection. Our (overly ambitious?) goal is to have a prototype up and running by the end of the semester.

The class has met a few times and have already split themselves into nine intimidating-sounding working groups: Project Management, System Administration, Digitization, Standards, Metadata, Information Architecture, Services, Evaluation, and Preservation. We’re very excited about the project and will post regular updates about how it’s going. Perhaps we’ll even hear from some of the students themselves on this very blog (if they want a good grade, that is . . .).

I got your website address from an article in the W.S. Journal Sunday, Feb. 17.

I am very interested in reading of your HUGE AMT. of work to organize this great resource.

I would love to take the time to work and get my families “treasures” organized. (this includes photos, negatives, slides, movies) I have some old slides, and negatives that are larger than the usual. Could i e-mail you about this, and ideas how to “copy” them?

Thank you for your work. It is very interesting, and greatly appreciated.

I saw Fran’s comment on this post, & because I’m compulsive, I just had to track down the article. Turns out, the W.S. Journal is the *Winston-Salem Journal*, not the Wall Street Journal! (Can you tell I’m not from NC?) And then since I went to all that trouble, I just had to share.

Turns out, the W.S. Journal has only an abstract available online for free; to get the full article costs.

For those with database access, however, the W.S. Journal in indexed in several sources.